Progress in fighting wheat rust

I have been hard at work in recent years combating a significant disease of wheat. Stem rust is caused by a group of nasty fungal organisms that can infect wheat plants and devastate yields. In some cases up to 100% of the crop can be lost. That’s a disaster for farmers, obviously, but it’s also potentially an enormous problem for those of us who eat bread, hotcakes and muffins, and who want to keep such foodstuffs in our diet.

The battle between stem rust and agricultural researchers isn’t new. Sometimes the tide runs in one direction, sometimes in another. At the end of the last century the...